


En Rapprochant

by SirJosephBanksFRS



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-20
Updated: 2014-09-20
Packaged: 2018-02-18 01:53:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,862
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2330894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SirJosephBanksFRS/pseuds/SirJosephBanksFRS
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set at the conclusion of <i>the Commodore</i>, Stephen has a tender reunion with Diana in Drimoleague</p>
            </blockquote>





	En Rapprochant

Diana took Stephen's hand, opened the bedroom door and pulling him inside, she closed it. It was a large room with a very large, snowy bed lit by floor to ceiling windows with a western exposure. He stood there fairly amazed, astonished to be in her bedroom and she indicated her back, lifting her hair and he obliged her by unbuttoning the long row of jet buttons that ran the length of her spine. He took his coat off, laying it across a chair and looked up as she turned and looked at him.

Her face fell and to his great unhappiness, what he had feared would come to pass between them far more than any anger or coldness on her part was happening before him as Diana's eyes filled with tears, she put her fist to her lips to silence herself as she came totally undone and lay down upon the bed, sobbing in the most heart-wrenching expression of misery Stephen had ever seen of her. He felt tears rising in his own eyes and his own throat tightening. He sat down on the bed next to her in his breeches and shirt sleeves.

"Honey, pray do not weep so, my love. Never vex yourself so," he said very gently in her ear, leaning over, holding her shoulders.

"Oh, Stephen, I am such an odious failure." She wept into the pillow and then struck the bed with her fist. "Such an odious failure and now I blubber before you like a pathetic fool from a Sarah Siddons’ melodrama. Dear God, what a miserable, miserable wretch I am, Stephen!" she sobbed, shaking her head.

"No, no, my darling, no," he said, shaken to see how completely despondent she was.

"I thought if you could have seen me, you would have loathed me so, such disgusting self-pity and repulsive weakness, such inexcusable, despicable cowardice to flee that way from my own child. We should never, ever have had a baby, Maturin. It was utterly absurd. I am no mother, I have no notion of what it is to be a mother. Aunt Williams, as awful as she is, made a far better mother than I. I am wholly deficient and so the child..." She broke down weeping again. "You cannot possibly ever forgive me, never in life, and I do not blame you in the least," she said and she fell into sobbing again. He moved so his lips were very close to her ear and he stroked her back.

"There is nothing to forgive. Oh, my dear, dear Diana, it is I who beg your pardon, my dearest soul, that you have suffered so without me. I should give anything to have had it not be so. Our baby, our child, our daughter, our precious Brigid -- she does not suffer from idiocy or any mental defect whatever, my love," Stephen said, feeling tears in his own throat. She looked him in the eye and he thought there was now more than a tinge of anger in her misery and she turned away, weeping.

"Stephen, you may think this a kindness, but it is not, to lie to a mother about her child, even to such a perfectly hopeless excuse for a mother as myself..." He grasped her tightly, and then pulled her face up towards his own and looked sharply into her sapphire eyes.

"Diana, look at me. Look at me now. Do you believe that I could or would lie to you, my dear, about such a grave matter as the health of our child? You wound me inestimably, but I daresay the fault is entirely mine. Diana, I swear to you upon all that I hold dear, upon all that is holy, by Our Lady, Mary herself, the very Mother of God that our Brigid is as entirely sound in mind and body as I can ascertain and that her wits are equal to those of any child her age. She and Clarissa Oakes and Padeen are in Spain now, I took them there myself. Our Brigid is speaking three tongues fluently now: Irish, English and Castilian. She makes as much sense as you or I do. You did nothing wrong."

Her lips parted but no words came out. Shock and disbelief played across her face. Clearly, it was more than she could dare to hope to be true or to comprehend. He took the hem of the pillowcase and dabbed her tears, leaning forward and kissing her cheek.

"How? How is such a thing possible? How did you cure her, Stephen? She could not make one sound, aside from weeping, which she virtually never did. My God, Stephen, you are such a genius of a medical man, far beyond anything that I could ever imagine.  Aubrey said you could raise the dead and now I know it must actually be true," she said in a voice full of wonder.

"The credit is not mine -- it goes entirely to Padeen. Yes, my Padeen, my servant. He has a gift, a very great gift to heal and to charm and I have seen him work wonders many times before. He spoke in Irish to Brigid upon our arrival and within days, she was actually speaking. We have a word in Ireland for children like Brigid," Stephen said. "We say they are enchanted, for they have a purity and intensity of soul far beyond that of most people," he said, knowing there was no way he could explain the existence of the _leanaí sídhe_ to her in any way at that point. "Padeen's gift is charming wild things and soothing them and all children are drawn to him for his gentleness and thus he drew out our little Bridie. I myself could not have had the effect upon her that Padeen has had, may God set a flower upon his head. Pray do not blame yourself or punish yourself one second further, Diana, you did absolutely nothing wrong. You are not to blame," he said, stroking her hair as she wept anew, from a mixture of what he assumed must have been extreme shock and relief. She stopped finally and turned her face to his again and he looked into her tear-stained face and kissed her deeply. She pulled him closer to her and he undressed with one hand as he kissed her.

"Are you home now? Are you really and truly home?" He explained to her about Jack's command, the French, the ship, that they would be returning home to Woolcombe in certainly in no more than a week's time, he thought.

"I do not want to let you go. I do not want you to go back, even to the ship now to fetch your things. Stephen, truly, I meant it, you must not leave me so ever again. It has been three years, eleven months and twenty-seven days since I saw you last. I thought you must have died. I resigned myself to never seeing you ever again and it wholly destroyed me. Promise me you shall never, ever leave me so long again, if we are to be together, if we are to be anything to each other at all. Otherwise, I cannot go on this way, Maturin, without going barking mad. Promise me so if you did not actually come here to say good-bye to me for once and for all. "

"The war is almost certainly at an end."

"People have been claiming so continually for the last ten years," Diana said. "Yet that goddamned Bonaparte appears to have no notion of it."

"Sure, it is true, but I am honestly of that opinion now, dear joy. So much so that I believe we may leave for Spain in two weeks, _a chuisle_ , if it pleases you." He said this with full confidence that Jack would certainly release him from any obligation, given the circumstances. He knew he must seize the initiative now or risk losing more than he could possibly bear. She looked up at him in surprise.

"Truly?" she said, her eyes sparkling at the idea, which made Stephen's heart very full at her plainly avid desire for his company.

"Yes, my love, if you will have me, if you can find it in your heart to forgive me so that we might be together," Stephen said. "For I must beg your forgiveness. Without any intention whatever, I have caused you so very much pain. That fact grieves me more than anything I have ever done in the whole of my life. Can you ever forgive me?" She embraced him around the neck and tears streamed down her face and he drew her closer as they kissed. His hands trembled. The weight of the reality that his beautiful wife, the mother of his child lay in his arms struck him and he realised how deeply he had come to believe that he would never occasion the act of holding her person in his arms again. Tears rose in his eyes as he experienced the unfathomable sweetness of making love to Diana once more, his prayers for a miracle of forgiveness answered.

 **  
  
** She lay contentedly in his arms as he kissed her neck, stroking her arm and breast, feeling the sublime silkiness of her skin, wholly intoxicated by her fragrance, gazing at her exquisite profile.

"Stephen, my darling, might we go to France to stay when the war ends?" she said, her voice still changed in timbre by their acts, the change he found so intoxicatingly delightful.

"Of course, my love," he said and he stretched to nose the jet black hair away from the nape of her neck as he kissed her behind a perfect ear.

"Truly? Might we stay for a whole year or even more in Paris? Perhaps we could find a house to rent near the Hôtel de la Mothe? We might send for Clarissa and Brigid, after we have a place."

"It is a splendid plan," he said, kissing her. "I thoroughly approve."

"Might we leave for France as soon as the war is over, the very moment that it ends?" she said, looking up into his face. His virile principle stirred deep in his belly, amazingly so, he thought, as they had only finished coupling less than ten minutes beforehand. His refractory period was shorter than he had ever known it in the last fifteen years.

"Of course, Diana, my love," he said rolling over towards her so that they were face to face, his mind filled with thoughts of making love to her in Paris in the spring, with the doors to a balcony opened, the scent of the pear blossoms of the hundreds of pear trees near the Hôtel de la Mothe perfuming the air.

"Truly?" she asked again, her eyes lit with the tenderest love he had ever seen in them. He kissed her deeply as he moved between her legs.

"I give you my sacred oath that it shall be so," Maturin said quickly, before the power of speech left him entirely as he was consumed by the sensation of being enveloped by her once more.

 

 


End file.
